And by "hatch" I mean "are made unavailable for purchase due to the closure of the 3DS eShop".
Sleep Clock, a DSiWare app, is the best alarm clock I've ever used. How good is it? I wrote about it in 2014 when I started using it and I've legitimately used it every single day since. It's the only alarm that hasn't eventually become annoying to me and it wakes me up immediately every time I use it. It just beeps and tells you the time. It has some basic sleep logging stuff, but the thing I love it for most is how consistently and painlessly it wakes me up. It's the lack of sleep that hurts in the mornings, not the annoying alarm sounds.
I haven't needed an alarm every single day, but I still log my sleep every night, which helped me discover I probably have non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder, a circadian rhythm disorder which means my sleep schedule doesn't match up with the planet's 24-hour day/night cycle. This is not a normal sleeping pattern, apparently:
The app retains the past 750 days of sleep records and you can rate how you feel when you wake up, which means you can look back and see what time of day is most comfortable for you to wake up (later) and how much sleep feels best for you (longer). It's a pretty rudimentary system, but it achieves its goals. A drawback of this system is that the 3DS clock doesn't seem to support daylight savings time and the app doesn't account for it, so twice a year the sleep-wake data will be inaccurate if you're in a part of the world affected by dumb chronological systems.
Mr. Sheep, the game's mascot, will be there with you in the morning to share an anecdote or suggestion for the day, like a lucky color or telling you to touch some grass. I'm usually too disoriented in the morning to read these (I actually log my sleep and close the app/3DS before I've properly regained consciousness a lot of the time) but I think I've read them all anyway; there doesn't seem to be much variety.
Wikipedia says Sleep Clock was never released in North America, which is a real shame, but this is a PSA to get this thing while you can if you can, because in my experience, alarm clocks don't get better than this. It's not free, but the price is so low it might as well be. Especially if you use it for a decade like I will have done in a couple of years. And I guess if you start now, you'll have used it for one decade when I'll have used it for two. You'll never catch up to me, never!!! Okay, I'm going back to sleep...
I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if other people took turns curating the Giant Bomb Infinite Out Of Context Twitter account. I've been running it for a relatively long time now and I've been doing it my way, but I'd like to see how other people would do things. I'll retain control as founder and overseer of the account, but for the most part the curator will be able to run it however they want. I haven't posted in a while, but I've still been collecting messages, so right now there are over 100 in the queue. I'll pass those images along to the next curator and it'll be fun to see which messages they choose first.
Twitter recently changed how images are displayed and none of the files in the queue are the right aspect ratio. Someone wrote a script for me to use Photoshop to automatically edit them, but I took too long getting Photoshop myself and I forgot who it was, sorry! As a result, potential candidates may want to have Photoshop available. Or you can use your own methods; do whatever you want, that's the point!
If you're interested, leave a comment below or message me however you want. I don't want it to be a popularity contest or to influence it with my own bias, so I'll choose the next curator randomly from the list of candidates. I would, however, like to restrict applications to known members of the GBI community, just to maintain the culture and some level of accountability. Sorry, lurkers! We still appreciate you. In the case that nobody's interested, I'll just keep running it myself. The people have spoken!
There's not really a hard deadline for this, I'll just pick someone after I'm reasonably sure everyone's had a chance to throw their name in.
Let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions. I'd like to work out the smaller details with the community, like how often we change curators, etc. so definitely let me know your opinions. You can also still come to me for anything you need after the new curator takes over, including submissions.
My adventures in Spira continue! Final Fantasy X: HD Remaster Edition is my first Final Fantasy game, I just passed 25 hours and here's what I know so far. For context, I'm currently on my way to Lake Ice World and, yes, I dodged 200 lightnings.
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In no particular order, my thoughts:
Wakka just gets more racist, huh?
I like that most of the side characters have names and personalities, like the chocobo knights. That's really cool.
I appreciate that the linearity of the story is balanced by how open the mechanics are in terms of customizing weapons and navigating the sphere grid.
O'aka seems like an alright guy.
The party members don't have individual levels, so it's hard to know how over- or under-powered they are compared to each other.
Unless I missed it somewhere, they never explained the Jar Jar Binks race of people, the shoopuf drivers. For a game that loves explaining the races and cultures of its world, they seemed strangely ignored.
I love the excuses that are made for using some machina but not others. "Yevon says some are okay, stop questioning it!"
The temple puzzles don't make any sense to me.
Everything in this world is a sphere, but when the characters mention "spheres", they're usually just talking about video spheres, the least common sphere for me to come in contact with.
I like the Noel Coward guy who travels around telling you about different things in Spira.
When walking around hub areas, it's sometimes relevant whether I'm walking around as just Tidus or as the whole party, but there's no way to tell. ("You must not leave without Lady Yuna!" Oh, is Yuna not with me right now?)
Blitzball bad.
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You can join the pilgrimage by visiting me on Twitch, where I stream daily, or catch the archives on YouTube. I'm planning on playing X-2 next, with 7R and XII on the horizon.
I've been playing Final Fantasy X (HD Remaster) on Twitch near-daily (also being gradually archived on YouTube for dedicated VOD viewers) and just passed the 10-hour mark, so I want to get down some of my thoughts about the game so far. In no particular order:
Tidus is the stupidest person in the world.
Maester Mika has a cool voice.
Fire, Thunder, Water and Ice is a bad selection of RPG elements.
Kimahri's story is the most interesting to me right now.
They call themselves humans, but they can breathe underwater and it doesn't seem to be because of magic.
Dona is one of my favorite characters.
Who was that Psycho Mantis demon child?
Tidus' adventure game narration is very funny to me.
I always forget which skills are in which menu in combat.
Are the controls for switching between targets in combat really relative to the camera? That's what it seems like and it seems dumb.
I don't think I like blitzball, but I think I want to like it.
This game is really fun and I want to get back to playing it right now.
Snake, we're sending you into an isolated environment to find and destroy a bipedal nuclear weapon: Metal Gear. Before you reach it, though, you'll likely have to do battle with a helicopter, as well as a sniper who is probably a beautiful woman and may be able to use photosynthesis. Should you find yourself captured, a mysterious third party will help you escape. They may be some kind of cyborg ninja, if you can imagine such a thing. A young man will also be there to help you along your way, but he'll have a female love interest, a relationship which will end in tragedy. Make liberal use of any cardboard boxes you find and be prepared to climb many stairs and ladders. We'll probably spend dozens of hours talking during your mission, but if you need any extra help, use frequency 140.85.
Copies are obviously a major part of the Metal Gear story - the characters are literally clones of each other - but repetition also plays a role in the structure of the games, the formula for how they're put together. The repeated elements are deeply embedded in the DNA of the plots and storylines of Metal Gear. In other words, these memes are the genes of the scenes. They are the skeleton upon which the the individual games' unique qualities can rest. By starting with a common base, Kojima can flesh out the details and trace them back to their legendary lineage.
The most obvious example of this repetitive structure is in Sons of Liberty, when it's deliberately invoked and the similarities of Raiden's mission to Solid Snake's on Shadow Moses Island are discussed explicitly. Raiden is told that he's being subconsciously trained to take the role of Snake. In a way, the characters in Metal Gear are kind of like the characters in The Legend of Zelda. You have Link, Zelda and Ganon, right? No, you have multiple Links, Zeldas and Ganons* existing across different stories. Just as the many Links all play the part of the Hero of Time, so do John, David and Jack play the part of Snake throughout the Metal Gear canon. The character of Snake exists outside of any one of them, but couldn't exist without all of them adding their input and defining the character's boundaries.
"There's room for only one Snake, and one Big Boss!"
The characters we see fill the spaces of the roles they're playing in the stories, creating supertextual characters who exist broadly across a range of textual, named characters. Snake, the sniper, the ninja. These are archetypes reminiscent of characters from commedia dell'arte, such as Pulcinella, whose portrayal can vary wildly between performances; sometimes servant, sometimes master. This amorphousness also invites a comparison to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's seminal work in which supertextual characters don't quite exist on their own but live and transform and grow through textual characters, events and obscure references. The story of Finnegans Wake itself must be sought out by piecing through the rubble of puns, riddles and word salad. The textual characters are seen on the stage, but it's only when you look past them that you see the supertextual characters playing out their own narrative in the background, taking shape in the shadows of the textual characters.
Throughout the individual narratives of textual characters, a foundation is built to consider the supertextual characters they represent. Snake, no matter who the textual character is, is the protagonist, the player character. He is the force for good against the threat of nuclear war. Big Boss, Colonel Campbell and Major Zero at some point all play the role of the supertextual commanding officer and all eventually turn against the Snake character. It's significant to note that both of these supertextual characters are represented by the textual character of Big Boss at different times, and that Big Boss is a separate supertextual character of his own. Clearly Kojima likes to weave complications even throughout his metanarratives.
This examination and analysis of character types and archetypes is key to understanding who these characters are and the parts they play in the Metal Gear saga. It's as if they're in some kind of acutely choreographed dance, switching who is leading and who is following throughout and passing between partners between each movement. Like a square dance where Kojima is the caller, making it up as he goes along and hoping all his improvisations don't cause the dancers to crash into each other. This spread of understanding across characters isn't unique to Metal Gear, however; as Michelle J. Levine notes, "In Nahmanide's view, the portrait of a biblical figure is incomplete unless it is reconstructed in relation to other biblical personae who exhibit parallel or contrasting behaviors and personality traits."1 This use of biblical characterization and type scenes is a tool heavily used by Kojima to give Metal Gear an epic, mythological feel.
'Type scene' is a term used to describe a stock scene repeated multiple times, especially in the Bible and Homeric texts. As Robert Alter puts it, "in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances."2 This same convention is used throughout the Metal Gear series, with patterns of events being repeated multiple times. This technique is used not to emphasize the mirrored elements but to expose the differences in these scenes - it's the variations which are impactful, such as the various methods for escaping the jail cells. Kojima is plainly aware of this effect and has fun winking at players with references to prior iterations of type scenes in previous games.
A notable example of a variation in type scene is Snake Eater's Virtuous Mission. This is a prelude before the game's main mission, similar to MGS2's Tanker Mission and MGSV's Ground Zeroes, missions which go wrong and set up the main game. What sets the Virtuous Mission apart is that the other two pre-missions are performed by different textual characters to the main game. Solid Snake is replaced by Raiden and Big Boss is replaced by Venom Snake. In MGS3, however, Naked Snake is given both the Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater. This discprepancy is highlighted by Snake's commanding officer changing his name from Major Tom to Major Zero between missions. The meaning behind this type scene variation is left to the audience to explain for themselves. Could this be another replacement Snake, perhaps a twin imbued with his brother's memories? If so, what happened to the original? Did he maybe die from the radiation of the Davy Crockett or was he executed along with the original Major Tom? Another explanation is that this is just demonstrating Snake at the peak of his abilities - he succeeded where Solid Snake and his older self could not.
Kojima's plans to stop making Metal Gear have been long documented3 since Metal Gear Solid, so it's ironic that the series that brought cinema to the video game realm quickly became a victim of Hollywood sequelitis. Between the release of MGS1 in 1998 and MGS2 in 2001, the number of movie sequels being produced skyrocketed, which compounded the image of their success. As Jedediah Leland explains, "Whereas only two of the 25 top-grossing films of 1996-98 were sequels, by 2001-03, the number has risen to 12."4 Kojima didn't have anything left to say, or didn't want to have anything left to say, but he was forced to keep making the same games, so that's what he did. Metal Gear Solid was already basically a 3D remake of the 2D games - half the puzzles are the same; the women's bathroom, the heat-adaptive key, etc. - but having to create new games forced Kojima to bring back plotlines, fold the thick web of the plot back over itself and resurrect those supertextual characters, reinforcing the templates he'd created so long ago. Todd Berliner suggests that sequels are inherently forced to appeal to what audiences previously enjoyed, doubling down on the familiar. "When C-3PO and R2-D2 make narratively gratuitous reappearances in George Lucas's [sic] prequels to the initial Star Wars trilogy, the prequels attempt not only to reinspire the audience's affection for the characters but to call up the spectacle of C-3PO and R2-D2 by superficially reiterating their connection to the prior films we loved."5 Even full-on textual characters who have died don't get to stay dead. They return again and again, as ghosts, as AIs, as delusions, as zombies. These revenants are pained, tortured in their continued existence. If Kojima can't rest, neither will anyone else.
At the end of The Phantom Pain, Big Boss punches a mirror, smashing it - the physical tool used to create visual copies is broken and so too is the cycle of repetition. As the storyline loops back to the first Metal Gear game, we're invited to reflect on the nature of cause and effect. From a certain point of view, iterations are introduced before the elements they're repeating. A snake eating its own tail. When Ocelot brainwashed himself to become Liquid Ocelot, he was probably inspired by the creation of Venom Snake in MGSV. An earlier event for him, but one we don't get access to until much later. Taking a broader view of these patterns shows us the ripples throughout the timeline and allows us to follow the epic with more precision. What was first introduced as an oddball scheme is traced back to become a much more substantial aspect of the overall arc of several characters. As Adam Neely would say, repetition legitimizes.
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* Most of the time it's the same Ganon being resurrected, but Four Swords Adventures has a separate incarnation.
1 Levine, Michelle J. “CHARACTER, CHARACTERIZATION, AND INTERTEXTUALITY IN NAHMANIDES'S COMMENTARY ON BIBLICAL NARRATIVE.” Hebrew Studies, vol. 53, 2012, pp. 121–142. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23344444. Accessed 7 July 2021.
2 Alter, Robert. “Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 2, 1978, pp. 355–368. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343017. Accessed 7 July 2021.
4 Leland, Jedediah. “MORE IS LESS: Hollywood's Sequel Addiction Explained.” Film Comment, vol. 40, no. 1, 2004, pp. 46–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43456649. Accessed 7 July 2021.
5 BERLINER, TODD. “THE PLEASURES OF DISAPPOINTMENT: SEQUELS AND THE GODFATHER, PART II.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 53, no. 2/3, 2001, pp. 107–123. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688360. Accessed 7 July 2021.
Further references
Heath, Timothy B., et al. “Innovation Sequences over Iterated Offerings: A Relative Innovation, Comfort, and Stimulation Framework of Consumer Responses.” Journal of Marketing, vol. 79, no. 6, 2015, pp. 71–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43784522. Accessed 7 July 2021.
LEGGAT, GRAHAM. “Chip Off the Old Block.” Film Comment, vol. 40, no. 6, 2004, pp. 26–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43456221. Accessed 7 July 2021.
Jones, Dave. “Narrative Reformulated: Storytelling in Videogames.” CEA Critic, vol. 70, no. 3, 2008, pp. 20–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44378365. Accessed 7 July 2021.
A few years ago I talked about starting a Giant Bomb subtitling project, as I think others have before, but since the videos tend to be hours long, it's a lot of work. I had some time I couldn't do much with, so I spent the past few days subtitling this 4-minute one-man Quick Look. You can download the results here. Some of the audio is colored to represent the game announcer. The original plan was to assign a different color to each member of staff and I still think that's a good idea if I continue. Let me know any feedback you might have.
I'll start on some longer videos with more people right now, so I'll see you in a year when I've finished the next one!
You know how to use subtitles with a video, don't you? Just download the subtitles and the video (Do you still have to be Premium to download videos?) Once you're playing the video locally, your video player should have some options to choose a subtitle track on the toolbar or if you right-click the video.
A puzzle platformer in which the player is equipped with the ability to take an afterimage of the level, moving obstacles and enemies around.
The Quick Look: Running time: 29:12, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro.
Vinny introduces the game as "not terrible" before starting up the fifth level of the second batch of levels, 'Crushed Crosswalk', in order to show off how the game works. After that, he jumps to where he's up to in the game, near the beginning of the third batch of levels. There's a discussion of The Commuter's Lament as well as parenting, in which I think Vinny says Max is now 6, which is crazy to me.
They spend the last 10-15 minutes of the video trying to figure out a single puzzle and Alex really reminds me of Ryan as he offers suggestions to Vinny and tries to come up with a suitable solution. They never solve it, but encourage commenters to offer their own ways of completing the puzzle.
Alex says the controls seem floaty to watch while Vinny complains that there's something missing to the feedback of the camera mechanic that puts the gameplay just out of reach of being fun.
The Game: A puzzle platformer where the player is equipped with the ability to take an afterimage of the level, moving obstacles and enemies around.
The Quick Look: Running time: 29:12, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro. Vinny introduces the game as "not terrible" before starting up the fifth level of the second batch of levels, 'Crushed Crosswalk', in order to show off how the game works. After that, he jumps to where he's up to in the game, near the beginning of the third batch of levels. There's a discussion of The Commuter's Lament as well as parenting, in which I think Vinny says Max is now 6, which is crazy to me.
They spend the last 10-15 minutes of the video trying to figure out a single puzzle and Alex really reminds me of Ryan as he offers suggestions to Vinny and tries to come up with a suitable solution. They never solve it, but encourage commenters to offer their own ways of completing the puzzle.
Alex says the controls seem floaty to watch while Vinny complains that there's something missing to the feedback of the camera mechanic that puts the gameplay just out of reach of being fun.
The Quick Look: Running time: 50:28, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro.
Vinny starts a new save, "Not Omen", to show the beginning of the game. He expertly completes the tutorial and when the opening cinematic (which includes a scene where a man gives Satan a blowjob) ends at the 8 minute mark, he's ready to play. His mission is to kill as many people in the mental hospital as possible, using a combination of pillows, Slippery Juice(tm) and MURDER!!!
Vinny shows some of the upgrade tree and tries to expand into pyromancy, which he doesn't have much experience with. This allows him to cremate a corpse to which a nurse is trying to provide first aid. She doesn't care. There's also an extended sequence where Vinny chases a doctor repeatedly from his office to the bathroom next door with a crash cart. Between all the fun, though, there are scenes including brutal violence, multiple gruesome child suicides and a reference to Pewdiepie.
Vinny has played before and knows what to do, which makes progressing as far as he did up to the second level easier, but he still has trouble contending with confused AIs who don't care about money nor donuts and Lucius' irritating insistence on levitating everything he carries.
This Quick Look is just a great opportunity to watch Vinny interact with a janky supernatural-Hitman environment and at the end, he even says he might come back to it at some point.
Three iOS games big enough to have commercials play during the Super Bowl; Game of War, Clash of Clans and Heroes Charge.
The Quick Look: Running time: 28:13, starring Drew Scanlon and Jeff Gerstmann.
To begin, Drew shows us and Jeff, who hasn't seem them before, the ads in question. Jeff questions who Kate Upton is and Drew describes her as a "professional pretty lady". Drew says he enjoyed the Liam Neeson commercial.
The first two games are very similar games with the mobile game-standard energy meters and micro-transactions. Drew tries to explain to the best of his ability all of these different systems and currencies while Jeff tries to wrap his head around all the flashing lights vying for his attention. In each of the games, Drew launches an attack on an enemy player before moving on.
The third game, Heroes Charge, is instead more of a tactical real-time game with RPG elements. Drew goes more in depth with his explanations of this game's abilities and levelling system and expresses his appreciation for the game, citing its light strategy. Jeff says he thinks it would make an okay handheld game with the micro-transactions removed.
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